THE CATHOLIC CHURCH NOT HOSTILE TO SCIENCE IN HER ACTION.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VI, Issue 280, 13 September 1878, Page 5

THE CATHOLIC CHUR CH NOT HOSTILE TO SCIENCE IN HER ACTION.

(Continued.)

Such was the abuse and one by no means hard of explanation. But who most conspicuously fell into that abuse? The very men whom the Church checked in their extravagances. Such men as Roscelin, Abelard, Gilbert de la Poiree, Amaury — men " pretending to know all things except the neacio, I know not," as S. Bernard reproaches the vain Abelard. Balmes — a man of genius, one of the most powerful and learned minds of our day — does not hesitate to declare that, " had the human intellect followed in its development the way marked out to it by the Church, European civilization would have gained at least two centuries : the fourteenth century would have been as advanced as the sixteenth was." With Roscelin, Abelard, Gilbert de la PoirSe, and Amaury the phrase was " Let us reason, subtilise, and apply our systems to all kinds of questions ; let our reason be our rule aud guide, without which knowledge is impossible." With S. Bernard, P.Anselm, Hugh and Richard de S. Victor, Peter Lombard, and S. Thomas, it was : " Let us see what antiquity teaches ; let us study the extant works of the past ; let us analyse and compare their texts; we cannot place our dependence exclusively on arguments, which are sometimes dangerous and often futile." Which of these two judgments has been actually confirmed 1 Which of these methods was adopted when true progress was made ! On which side then was reason 1 With the Church or with her adversaries 1 On which side was genuine intellectual enlargement ? There can be only one reply. Now these are not mere opinions — they are facts, historical facts, represented to us in irrefragable documents. All honour to the Catholic Church for resisting a false and counterfeit erudition which usurped the place of true knowledge 1 All honour especially to those two giant minds, S. Bernard, in the 12th century, and S. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th, who are the sublime personifications of the Catholic Church in her struggle for the free march of the human intellect in the path of truth. We now pass on to the 16th century and here we meet the most popular and widespread fallacy in respect to the attitude of the Catholic Church towards science and mental progress. The Catholic Church opposed the Reformation. Now the Reformation was the revival of literature and science in Europe ; it was a glorious emancipation of the human mind. Before it the world was darkness and chaos; after it, all was light and refinement. Before it science was forgotten or stationary ; after it scientific and literary progress was marvellous, etc., etc., Now nothing is more unfounded in fact, and, indeed, more utterly absurd, than this assertion that the revival of literature and science was brought about by the so-called Reformation. What is the argument of the advocates of this fiction ? They compare the state of Europe before and after the Reformation. Science and literature are in a more flourishing condition after than before the sixteenth century, therefore the Reformation caused the change for the better. • Never was there a more shallow sophism. It belong^ \o the category : pott hoc, ergo propter hoc — after this ; therefore otj account of this. To estimate aright the influence of the so-called Rafoimafton on learning, we should compare the literary and scientific state of Europe before it, with what it would have been afterwards, if the Reformation had not intervened ; or, more properly, we should, compare the progress which Europe really made after the Reformation, especially in nonCatholic countries, with what it would have made but for the agitations, wars, and miseries, caused by this revolution. On this fair test we fearlessly assert, on the authority of facts, that the literary and scientific influence of the Reformation was most disastrous. Ton must remark that I am here supposing, for argument's sake, that the fact is as stated by the admirers of the Reformation ; namely, that the condition of learning was really and immediately improved in these countries where it gained a foothold. We may well deny the fact, especially with regard to Germany, the first field of the Reformation. Instead of advancing, Germany clearly receded in the race of learning, not merely for a half, but for more than a whole century after the Reformation. Frederick Ton Schlegel, a German, and proud of the literature of his country, Schlegel, one of our modern literary giants, touches off the epoch of the Reformation in one word ; he styles it " barbaropolemic," Henry Hallam, the well-known English historian, distinctly informs us " that the most striking effect of the first preaching of the Reformation was that it appealed to the ignorant." (Introduction to the Literature of Europe, etc., vol. 1, p. 181, s. 19.) Erasmus, the most distinguished literary character of Germany in the sixteenth century, the intimate friend and correspondent of Melancthon, and of other leading reformers, writing after the Reformation, had been, enlightening the world about ten years, says " Wherever Lutheranism reigns, there literature utterly perishes." Again in the same year he caya — " I dislike these gospelers on many accounts, but chiefly because, through their agency, literature everywhere languishes, disappears, lies drooping and perishes ; and yet without learning what is a man's life ?" In a letter to Melancthon, he states that "at Straaburg the reformed party had publicly taught in 1524 that it was not right to cultivate science, and that no language should be studied except Hebrew." These grave charges of Erasmus were never answered, because they were unanswerable. Did not Luther, the founder of the Reformation, in his appeal to the German nobility, in 1520, openly teach that the works of Plato, Cicero, Aristotle, and of all the ancients, should be burnt ? Did not the reformers herald their love of enlightenment by destroying hundreds of flourishing colleges, schools, and academies, appropriating to their own avarice the educational funds of the Catholic Church, accumulated by the

liberality of many ages ? No wonder literature drooped where the. Reformation reigned. Did not Luther, appalled at the desolation he had caused*, urge the princes of Germany to compel the people by heavy taxation to replace the Catholic institutions which they had plundered and destroyed ? But was not his appeal ineffectual ? When his wild eloquence filled men's pockets, he was persuasive ; when he strove to empty them, he found them closed with the padlock which he himself had made. Few and feeble were the efforts of the reformers to rear schools and colleges, and they were attended with utter failure. Moreover, is it not an indisputable fact of history that the early reformers, animated with Vandalic fury, deliberately and triumphantly consigned to the flames extensive libraries and innumerable works of art? Illuminated manuscripts, paintings, statues, painted windows which modern art cannot imitate, were indiscriminately burnt to ashes by the infuriated reformers. So it was at Erf urth and Munster, so it was at Zurich. At Munster the library of Rudolph Langius, consisting almost entirely of Greek and Latin manuscripts, perished in the flames at the hands of the Anabaptists. Not only by acts of violence did the reformers injure science and literature, but also by other influences equally prejudicial. They averted men's minds from useful scientific pursuits to acrimonious and idle controversies. They engendered in the hearts of men mutual distrust and suspicion, a serious obstacle to the progress of learning. As an instance we may allege the obstinate resistance of the nonCatholic Governments of Eurppe to the correction of the Calendar introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. That correction was founded on the most incontestable principles of astronomy ; and yet folely because the improvement emanated from Rome', England refused to adopt it for 170 years— until 1752. Sweden adopted it in 1753, and the German states, the very cradle of the Reformation, only in 1776. As a distinguished writer has caustically remarked, the reformers preferred "warring with the stars to agreeing with the Pope. Such was their disinterested zeal for scientific progress. They caused restrictions on the liberty of the press by their shameful abuse of it, and this was also injurious to scientific progress. They caused long and bloody religious wars, which were an insuperable barrier to the advancement of learning. These wars continued at intervals for nearly 150 years ; and they filled Geimany with widespread desolation. Nation after nation was deluged with blood in that universal strife stirred up by the Reformation. The war of extermination against the peasants, preached by Luther, the bloody war against the Anabaptists, the wars of Charles V, and the Protestant princes of Germany, and finally the terrible thirty years' war — from 1618 to 1648 — made Germany a scene of turmoil, confusion, and bloodshed. How many monuments of ancient literature and art were swept away? How many cities desolated, libraries burnt, and men of eminence slain ? What leisure had men for scientific pursuits. ' We may then safely affirm that the Reformation retarded the learning of Germany for more than a century. At the dawn of the Reformation German literature was highly flourishing. Reuchlin, Budseus, and Erasmus had covered Germany with literary renown. Reuchlin, being on one occasion at Rome, so felicitously explained, and read with so pure an accent, a passage from Thucydides in the presence of the illustrious Greek Argyropilus, that the latter in admiration exclaimed : " Grcccxa, nostra exilio tratuvolavit Alpes " — our exiled Greece has crossed the Alps. Had Argyropilus visited Garmany a century later, he would have seen " exiled Greece " ruthlessly driven from her shelter by the myrmidons of the Reformation. But one luminous fact renders further proof . of my position superfluous. When learning in all non-Catholic lands was? almost a nonentity, Italy, the land of the Popes, produced th,pse 'orators, and poets, and writers of every kind, who in subsequent ages were universally received as models. Catholic Italy led the way. in literary improvement — that fact is sufficient to explode the fiction of the Church's hostility to science and learning. Hear the English historian, Hallam : "The difference in point of learning between Italy and England was at least that of a century ; that is, the former was more advanced in knowledge of ancient literature in 1400 than the latter in 1500." In another place, speaking of therelative encouragement of learning by Italy and Germany, he has this" remarkable passage : " Italy was then (in the beginning of the sixteenth century) and perhaps has been ever since, the soil where literature, if it has not always flourished, has stood highest in general estimation." T The avowal is the more precious as coming from a decided non-Catholic and an Englishman. ' - Literary societies for the promotion of learning were formed much later in Protestant Germany than in Catholic Italy and France, From the dawn of the Reformation to the reign of Frederick the Great— a- period of over 200 years — Germany was behind the other principal centres of Europe in learning ; it required fully 200 years for her to recover from the shock her literature fpft received from the reformers. In 1715 the great Leibnitz feelingly deplored the literary and scientific desolation of his country, So rare in Germany, he says, was the relish for scientific pursuits " that he could not find any person in the country who had a taste for philosophy and mathematics, and with whom he could converse." And- yet we hear in pulpit and press that the revival of learning is due to the Reformation. O, the enormous fiction 1 To Italy under her Medici, her Gonsagas, her Estes, and above all her Popes — and^moxe' especially Nicholas V. and Leo X. — do we in great measure owe the revival of learning. What person of any information' can deny the fact. Does not Roscoe, an English non-Catholic, prove the Pontificate of Leo X. to have been the golden age of learning ? Does not Hallam,' another non-Catholic historian, pay a splendid tribute to this second Augustan age of literature ? A bright light shot up in Italy—having Rome for its most dazzling'centre — and it' illumined the world. Under this genial sunlight, Europe, in a. literary point of view, was like, a beautiful garden, fragrant with fruits and flowers, when the ruthless storm of the Reformation swept over it, blighting its fair harvest of fruits and flowers, and changing it for a time into a desert. If literature was still preserved it was in spite of the Reformation. We do not deny that non-Catholics may justly claim illustrious literary and scientific men, but we say that they cannot compare either in num.*

ber or weight with the host of sv.blime geniuses in every line produced at all ages b} r the Catholic Church. A list would be tediors ; we refer any candid student to the scroll of history. And if we jegnrd the older inventions which have Dvoved of great and permanent utility to mankind, a far greater number were made by Catholics than by non-Catholics. Who invented the mariner's compass ? A Catholic. The art of printing ? A Catholic. Gunpowder ? A Catholic. The art of printing ? A Catholic. Clocks and watches ? Catholics. And steamboat navigation ? . Again a Catholic ; Blaxo de Garay, a Spaniard, made the first successful experiment in steam navigation in the harbour of Barcelona in 1543. To Catholics belongs the glory of the discovery of America, and of first doubling trie Cape pi Good Hope, and penetrating to the Indies. The microscope, the telescope, the thermometer, the barometer were all invented by Catholics. The chief great discoveries in astronomy — that of Jupiter's satellites, of spots in the sun, and of most of the new planets or asteroids — were made by Catholics. But in saying this Ido not intend to detract from the glory of Newton. The paper on which we write, the general use of window-glass and the art of staining it, the weaving of cloth, the art of enameling in ivory aud metals, the discovery of stone coal, the sciences of galvanism aud minerology — and many other inventions and improvements were first introduced by Catholics, and that too in the so-called '•' dark" ages. And it may be maintained on the faith of history that more great and important inventions were made during the 300 years preceding the Reformation than in the 300 years which have followed it. Still we are to be told that the Catholic Church is the foe of science and learning. Out upon such an impudent fiction and bare-faced calumny ! Why the two greatest periods of modern literature — that of Leo X. and Louis XIV — both occurred in Catholic countries and under Catholic auspices. While the literary glories of Queen Anne's reign in England were equaled, if not surpassed, by those of the much earlier age of Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain. A very common charge against the Catholic Church is that she keeps her people in ignorance, and to prove the charge an appeal is made to the condition of Catholic countries, in which, it is said, the common people are not educated. No assertion can be more unfounded. " For in every street in Rome — to take one instance — there are, or at least there were when the Popes were free Sovereigns of Rome, at short distances piiblic primary schools for the education of the lower and middle classes in the neighbourhood. Rome, with a population of 158,600 souls, has 372 primary schools, with 4B2 teachers and 14,000 children attending them. Has Edinburgh so many schools for the instruction of these classes ? Berlin, with a population about double that of Rome has only 264 schools. Rome has also her university, with an average attendance of 660 students ; and the Papal States, with a population of two and a half millions, contained seven universities. Prussia, with a population of 14,000,000 has but seven." So speaks Mr. Laing, a non-Catholic and a Scotchman. The testimony is splendid and conclusive. Sometimes non-Catholics point their finger at the Irish Catholic and upbraid him with his educational inferiority. This shows very bad taste and extreme ignorance. For if Ireland docs not hold the rank in education she is entitled to it is England's fault. Until a comparatively recent date she prevented education in Ireland, in the same manner as she crushed manufactures in Ireland and in India. The devotion of the Irish Catholic clergy and people in the cause of education, has been simply heroic. Whenever the Irish youth have had anything like a fair chance, they have been second to none in intellectual proficiency. For an Englishman to reproach an Irishman with his deficient schooling is like a man starving another and then taunting him with his emaciation. Happily England is opening her eyes \o her bigoted misgovernment, and is beginning to concede justice at least by small instalments. Cardinal Manning says that in primary education Ireland is already on a par with England. But the measure will not be filled until provisions have been adequately made for intermediate and higher education in Ireland, according to the principles and feelings of the vast majority of her people. For seven centuries Ireland has battled for the sacred rights of national education, but even at this hour, in the light of the 19th century, the boasted land of freedom and fair-play turns a deaf car to her cry of right. While Trinity College has its £60,000 a year, and the Queen's Colleges £ 30,000, with charters and royal recognition, that one seat of learning which represents the faith and science of the vast proportion of the people remains isolated and alone, without charter or endowment ; it is supported, like some poor scholar, by the charity and generosity of the faithful. And in New Zealand who can compare Catholics in their devotion aiul open-handedness for the cause of education 1 Godless education they abhor, and so with one hand they pay an unjust taxation, and with the other maintain their own schools. However, their lights are sacred, and never will they cease to protest and agitate against the crying in justice, until it is removed. And yet, I suppose, they must still be called the foes of science and enlightenment. Such is the non-Catholic notion of fair play.

Brother Jasper, the sun-mover, immersed 358 coloured converts in his church in Richmond, Va., on Sunday the 9th June. The pool was a small one, and when the work was over the water was quite dark. He has boasted that he can put more converts tinder water in one day than any other preacher, black or white. On. last Sunday, 800 persons were to be baptised in the First Africau Church. We have been infoimed that Dr. Kirkus, of this cit}--, recently preached a sermon in condemnation of private interpi ctation of the Bible. With Dr. Ewer, of New York, reiterating his conviction of the failure of Protestantism, with the Church Union of the same city asking for prayers for the dead, with the Baliimore Methodist Protestant presenting arguments for a belief in the existence of an intermediate state, and with Dr. Kirkus labouring to overturn the cornerstone of the Protestant schism, the indications are that the truth is making itself evident, and that the re-union of Christendom is not such a hopeless thing as might be thought. — Catholic Mirror, Haitimore,